Mulcair and Keystone: Where is the NDP’s Tony Blair?

Tom Mulcair got himself elected leader of the federal New Democratic Party on a promise he would bring hard-headed realism and a centrist political ethic to the job. He was to be, it was murmured at the time, the NDP’s Tony Blair.

As it turns out, there’s little indeed of Blair’s famous economic pragmatism in Mulcair. He talks the talk but, when push comes to shove, quacks like a duck. Currently, the NDP leader is tromping with big, gnarled feet all over the delicate buds of the Keystone XL pipeline. Criticism of his criticisms, while on a recent Washington D.C. trip, he dismisses as Conservative hypocrisy. All opposition leaders attack the governing party’s positions when travelling overseas!

Except, that Keystone and the issues tied to it are not just political baubles to be toyed with. These are fundamental, shared economic problems – the greatest Canadians now face. The Obama administration’s pending approval or rejection will affect us all from coast to coast to coast, for many years to come. And much of Mulcair’s rhetoric about Keystone is either poorly researched, half-true or spun-up by ideological assumptions that do not hold up for a second in the cold light of day.

First let’s address the idea that Alberta’s nefarious Big Oil oligarchs are foisting oilsands development on a reluctant eastern Canada, whose citizens will only suffer as the resultant global warming turns James Bay into a gigantic hot tub. This is the putative value proposition: Albertans benefit economically from the oilsands, but the rest of us are harmed. Why should their interests subsume ours?

Nonsense. The Conference Board of Canada found in a report last October (Fuel for Thought: The Economic Benefits of Oil Sands Investments for Canada’s Regions) that $100 billion has been invested in the oilsands in the past decade. But that is dwarfed by the $364 billion in price-adjusted investment expected between now and 2035. That breaks down, according to the report’s authors, as 880,000 person-years of employment stemming directly from investment, and an additional supply-chain effect of 1.45 million person-years.

That’s 3,970 person-years of employment per billion spent, not only in the obvious industries, such as oilfield services, but also in professional services, manufacturing, wholesale trade, financial services and transportation.

The punch line: Alberta gains – but so does everyone else. Ontario, the Conference Board estimates, will garner about 15 per cent of the supply-chain economic spinoffs, mainly in service industries such as administrative services, scientific and technical consulting, and computer services.

There are direct manufacturing spinoffs for the east, the report’s authors say: Makers of steel, steel pipes and tubes, valves, navigational, measuring, and other instruments, all will benefit. In B.C., manufacturers of plastic building materials and storage tanks, paper and wood products will see increased demand. The port of Vancouver is expected to undergo a boom in traffic from Asia. In Quebec, computer services, rail transport, communications and insurance firms will gain.

But there’s an even larger national effect, which should galvanize any good social democrat: Taxes. Between 2012 and 2035, the Conference Board estimates, oilsands-related investment is expected to generate nearly $80 billion in tax, on an inflation-adjusted basis, comprising personal income tax, corporate tax, and indirect taxes such as sales and fuel taxes. Of that $80 billion, the greatest share — $45.3 billion — is federal. In other words: There’s your health care. Or there’s your defence procurement. Take your pick of whatever federal service you most value.

Ah, but the NDP doesn’t want the oilsands shuttered, Mulcair says. Rather he wants the bitumen shipped east, and refined and processed in Canada, creating new jobs at home, rather than “exporting” them south. Which sounds fine — except that it’s not an either-or proposition. The economic health of the oil patch, and thus Canada, depends on bitumen flowing south, and east, and west, and northwest, at the same time. Such is the projected demand for crude over the next 20 years, and such is the glut now in the Midwest, which is causing Canadian crude to trade at a sharp discount to the world price. The “eastern option” is not an alternative — it’s a complement. And it’s happening anyway, Keystone aside.

But here is the greatest harm, possibly, in Mulcair’s recent rhetoric: He seems blissfully unaware that, just now, on this file, even the opposition leader’s words can matter, a lot. That’s because the crux of (President Barack) Obama’s decision is political, not economic or environmental. Each time Mulcair sounds a negative note on Keystone, he makes it easier for Washington to bow to the Hollywood Green lobby, and avoid making the right, if difficult, choice. He also makes it easier for Harper to absolve himself of blame, should Obama turn thumbs-down.

Is this a harbinger of the “competent, responsible public administration,” we’ve heard so much about? If so, then New Democrats were sold a bill of goods. There’s no Blairite Third Way here: It’s the same-old, same-old, dooming the NDP to return to the Stygian depths from whence it came: third place.

I am a national political columnist for Postmedia News. My work appears in the National Post, on Canada.com, the Ottawa Citizen, Montreal Gazette, Calgary Herald, Edmonton Journal, Halifax Chronicle-Herald... read more and Vancouver Sun, among other publications. I write primarily about national politics and policy.View author's profile